Supporting young writers at CRC-St Albans

Our creative approach - informed by lateral thinking, visual planning and storytelling - is not limited to the standard suite of creative literacy workshops we offer. It can be engaged to support schools’ own writing programs as well.

This term, we are working with the high school students at Catholic Regional College - St Albans who are participating in the Shared Stories program run by the Australian Catholic University. Shared Stories is an annual anthology of themed writing by high school students in Catholic schools across the country.

The theme for Shared Stories this year is ‘Respect’.

CRC - St Albans is one of the 18 schools participating in the program this year. Our creative facilitator Ben McKenzie is guiding the 20 young writers from the school through the writing process starting with idea generation through to the final submission.

On Friday, Ben and the young writers met for the first time via Google Classroom to brainstorm story ideas. The focus was to get the students to think out of the box when considering their plot. As he explained, a prosaic theme is no barrier to writers exploring the kind of writing they enjoy.

For example, one idea discussed was the narrator getting transported to a new, unexplored world and learning to respect a new culture.

This workshop will be followed by another online group session followed by two rounds of online individual feedback videos on the works by the young writers.

This is the second year that CRC - St Albans has brought 100 Story Building in to support their students through the program.

Ironically, the flexibility offered by remote learning had helped us this year to complete the entire project in a month, as against a whole term last year.

Remote learning, as it turns out, has its advantages!

To discuss how we can support an existing writing program at your school, write to us at info@100storybuilding.org.au.

View our suite of online creative literacy workshops.